Grow Your Self-Awareness, Reinvent Your Value

There’s a moment of hesitation surfacing today in organizations. Executives want middle managers to operate more cross-functionally so they can scale performance. Middle managers are waiting for permission from executives to activate their leadership voice and create more value. Written by leadership expert and coach Dan Gallagher, The Self-Aware Leader sharpens the self-awareness of middle managers to drive productivity and career growth.

Gallagher presents a model that emerging leaders, middle managers, and senior executives can use as a catalyst to grow their leadership value. Based on empirical research and more than two decades of use, the model fully integrates a deep focus on self-awareness and reinvention with the practices of servant leadership and business transformation.

This second edition includes additional thought exercises, new research on the Self-Aware Leader model and Generosity Quotient, and real examples of how increased self-awareness grows a leader’s value.

Make Learning Stick Through Reflection Activities

Employees today crave development, growth, and skill building. They also want more meaning and connection at work. When they learn to reflect on training experiences intentionally, they get all that and more. Pausing to reflect makes it easier to retain and transfer the knowledge and skills we need on the job.

L&D expert Katrina Kennedy shares more than 45 reflective learning activities that instructional designers, facilitators, and trainers can use in face-to-face and online classrooms to create more meaningful learning experiences for a variety of contexts and participants. Each activity is designed to help participants develop critical thinking skills and improve future performance by analyzing what they’ve learned and how far they’ve come.

Built around eight essential outcomes, this book will show you how to strengthen motivation, social connection, memory, and critical thinking skills through targeted reflection activities—all of which are adaptable for in-person or remote training situations. Activities include mental inventories for boosting motivation, shared learning maps for building social connection, and after-action reviews for improving performance.

Start achieving your organization’s business goals and building people’s capacities with this comprehensive reflection toolkit.

Become an Expert AI User and Strategy Leader

Artificial intelligence (AI) and performance expert Josh Cavalier shares his in-depth knowledge and skills to help L&D professionals master learning experience design by using generative AI in their employee learning and development efforts. More than just a technical manual on generative AI or a collection of best prompt practices, this book explores how AI is reshaping jobs, skill development, and human performance. Cavalier provides his Learning and Development AI Ecosystem framework as a practical road map for integrating AI into your day-to-day work and your organization.

Discover how to seamlessly incorporate AI into your existing L&D processes and broader L&D ecosystem, optimizing workflows and driving measurable results. Explore how AI-enabled L&D platforms can facilitate personalized learning paths, automated performance support, and real-time skills gap analysis. Learn how to craft effective prompts for learning design and use chatbots and AI assistants for help in the moment of need. And importantly, dive deep into the ethical considerations, from maintaining data privacy and security to mitigating bias in AI-powered learning solutions.

No matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes, L&D professionals must remain focused on performance—both of humans and now machines. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting your AI journey, this book is your essential resource to unleash the power of AI in L&D.

Demand for creative thinking is currently outpacing supply. Despite that need, creative thinking is one of the skills most lacking in job candidates. The good news is that creative thinking is a trainable skill. In this issue of TD at Work, Gerard J. Puccio and Pamela A. Szalay will:

• Explain the nature of creativity.
• Identify the four stages of the creative process.
• Present, and provide the opportunity to practice, six strategies to enhance creative thinking.
• Describe ways to facilitate creativity at individual, team, and organizational levels.
• Provide opportunities to pair creative thinking with artificial intelligence.

The Tools & Resources in this issue include a Worksheet: Diverge First Strategy, Tool: POINt Evaluation, and Exercise: Stakeholder Analysis.

Become Indispensable in Driving Business Growth

L&D leaders must know how to connect learning strategies with business strategies and communicate effectively with leaders to improve employee performance and drive revenue. In other words, L&D needs to run like a business. Enter learning operations expert Tracie Cantu and her innovative Learning Operations Blueprint, which puts critical business needs first and brings rigorous systems-based thinking to corporate learning.

This first-of-its-kind approach offers step-by-step guidance for updating L&D processes and structures to immediately improve results and increase the relevance of the L&D function. When learning teams and leadership become better partners, outcomes improve for organizations and employees.

You’ll learn how to build an L&D business model that works, how to manage a portfolio of learning products, and how to design employee learning experiences that improve outcomes without demanding more tech or human resources.

Cantu also provides questions for reflection, checklists, worksheets, and scorecards for practical application of her recommendations. Each chapter includes tips for taking action immediately and real-world stories that illustrate how to use the framework successfully and avoid common pitfalls.

With this book, you will learn to scale your impact, secure your influence, and reach L&D’s potential.

Empower Frontline Workers and You’ll Power Your Business

Frontline employees are the backbone of every organization. They’re the grocery clerks, manufacturing workers, call center representatives, hotel housekeepers, and retail associates who keep the world running. Yet, despite making up 70 to 80 percent of the global workforce, they are often treated as an afterthought. The Frontline Enablement Playbook is here to change that.

Written by JD Dillon, founder of LearnGeek and passionate advocate for the frontline, this book is a practical guide for HR, L&D, and operations professionals who want to do better by their deskless teams. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience and insights from over 100 global practitioners and actual frontline workers, Dillon delivers the first-ever playbook designed to help you build a frontline experience that’s resilient, adaptable, and human-centered.

Inside, you'll dive deep into six parts that redefine frontline support:

• Understanding who frontline workers really are—and what they need
• Architecting a modern enablement ecosystem
• Empowering frontline managers to empower their employees
• Helping frontline workers do a great job today
• Fostering future opportunities for development
• Evolving your entire strategy to get that all-important buy-in

This book is packed with tools and tactics that work—whether you’re looking to improve training, manage change more effectively, enhance communication, or support manager well-being. Modular by design, you can read the entire story or pick and choose specific sections to address timely needs. You’ll find frameworks like the Modern Learning Ecosystem, stories from the field, and letters from frontline workers themselves.

Stop just saying your frontline is essential and start proving it. Because when your frontline thrives, your business does too.